

CES 2013: Hands On With The Oculus VR Rift, Virtual Reality's Greatest Hope

I spent some time and got a little dizzy with the impressive Oculus VR Rift head-mounted display.

LAS VEGAS—I don't know if I've seen the future of virtual reality, but I do know I've seen its best chance in decades of amounting to anything. This renewed hope comes from the Oculus Rift from Oculus VR, and my short time playing with it has convinced me that it can make first-person games immersive to an unforeseen extent.

Virtual reality has long seemed like a dead concept. The idea of putting on bulky goggles and virtually exploring places was huge in the 90s, but has since given way to augmented reality and using your smartphone's camera to feed you information. As a child, I was a devout follower of VR, and I dreamed of some day putting on a ridiculous helmet and exploring virtual worlds like someone from VR.5. Incidentally, this probably marks the first time in approximately 15 years anyone has ever mentioned VR.5, a thirteen-episode show from 1995 that arguably started Anthony Head's American television career.

CES 2013 Bug Cut to 2013, and a suite in the Venetian at which Oculus VR had two prototype Oculus Rift devices set up. The Oculus Rift looks like a callback to 90s-era VR displays, with a giant visor that straps to your head and blocks out all outside light. Even the prototype development version, built of molded plastic instead of a foamcore shell, looks almost hilariously bulky. These aren't video glasses you can put on during a flight to watch a movie. These are virtual reality goggles, the likes of which I've dreamt of using to play video games since I was a kid.

My guides from Oculus VR strapped the goggles to my head and put an Xbox 360 controller in my hand so I could try the "citadel" demo, a look at how the game Infinity Blade can work on the Oculus VR. As soon as the Oculus Rift was fitted securely to my head, I found myself standing in a small medieval village. Guards in armor and carrying large weapons walked by, seemingly ignoring me as snow fell from the sky.

It wasn't quite realistic, but that was only because of the limits of the Unreal Engine and not the Oculus VR itself. Snowflakes fell before my eyes with perceivable depth from my face. I walked around the guards and saw their huge swords shift as I stepped, seeming like they were inches from cutting me. Even shutters on a window popped out at my face and I walked around them to see tangible depth. When I got very close to objects, it felt like I was close, and that they were inches from my eyes.

This is where the seams in the demo showed, because the textures of things like the stone walls and wooden shutters appear completely flat without advanced bump making, pixel shading, and other effects, so it looked more like I was staring at a house that was wallpapered to look like it was made of stone and wood. Again, this is the software's fault, not the hardware's. Considering this was just a demonstration of what the Oculus Rift can do, I was impressed.



After I took off the Oculus Rift, I found myself disoriented for a few moments. This was because the head tracking was so accurate in the demos, switching between real and virtual reality was jarring. The effect was so immersive that my brain really felt like I was there on some level, because the display followed how I looked at things normally. It might have also been that the straps on the Oculus Rift were a little tight, so my head felt slightly tingly because I effectively had a very large, padded rubber band around it for several minutes.

Oculus VR is getting ready to ship developer kits, but the Oculus Rift is a long way from hitting stores. While the technology is there, the combination of stereoscopic vision and head-tracking means games need to be built for the Oculus Rift with the device in mind, and that means experimentation and perfecting the interface. Things that work in standard first-person games don't work when you have an immersive 3D picture with head tracking, and motion sickness is a problem that must be tiptoed around. Still, it's an impressive display even at this early stage. If enough game developers get onboard, we could see a new resurgence of virtual reality as a "future" technology thanks to the Oculus Rift.

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